RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • ECMWF predicts 100% chance of “super El Niño”

    Source: New York Post

    “The latest long-range European forecast shows there’s a 100% chance of a super El Niño, potentially suppressing hurricane activity and making for a wetter fall and winter in the southern U.S. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) issued their May long-range forecast model, which ups the chances of the strongest El Niño ever hitting by November. … Typically, a strong El Niño like this one would mean suppressed hurricane activity in the Atlantic, and increased activity in the Eastern Pacific. However, the ECMWF isn’t yet showing a strong decrease in hurricane forecast numbers for the season, making it possible that the strongest El Niño effects may not be felt until later into the season.” (05/07/26)

    https://nypost.com/2026/05/07/science/2026-el-nino-intensity-forecast-explained-what-to-know/

  • More than a dozen former NFL players join sex abuse lawsuits against Ohio State University

    Source: NBC News

    “Thirty former Ohio State University football players, including more than a dozen who went on to play in the NFL, signed on to the class action lawsuit brought by other ex-OSU students who say they were sexually abused decades ago by campus doctor Richard Strauss. … NBC News has reached out to OSU for comment about the 30 men joining the lawsuit but didn’t immediately receive a response. The university and its former president have previously publicly apologized ‘to each person who endured’ abuse at the hands of Strauss. Ohio State has been battling Strauss-related lawsuits in the Southern District of Ohio since 2018.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dozen-former-nfl-players-join-sex-abuse-lawsuits-ohio-state-university-rcna343547

  • Clarence Thomas becomes second longest-serving SCOTUS justice in American history

    Source: SFGate

    “The first baby boomer on the Supreme Court hit a milestone on Thursday, becoming the second-longest serving justice in history at a time when his influence has never seemed greater. Once an outlier on the nation’s highest court, Justice Clarence Thomas has become a towering figure in the conservative legal movement over the last decade as he helped secure landmark rulings on abortion, voting and Second Amendment rights. The only justice with a longer tenure is liberal William O. Douglas. Thomas would overtake Douglas in 2028 if he remains on the court, and there is no sign he plans to retire anytime soon.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/clarence-thomas-becomes-the-second-22246568.php

  • WHO: Hantavirus outbreak on cruise ship not start of pandemic

    Source: BBC News [UK State Media]

    “An outbreak of hantavirus on board a cruise ship is not the start of a pandemic, the UN health agency has said. Maria van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the World Health Organization (WHO), told a news briefing that it was not the same situation as six years ago with Covid-19, because hantavirus spreads through ‘close, intimate contact’. Health authorities are racing to trace dozens of people who have recently disembarked from the Dutch vessel MV Hondius. On Thursday, the WHO said that overall, five of eight suspected cases of hantavirus had been confirmed. Three people have died, including a 69-year-old Dutch woman, who had the virus. Her Dutch husband and a German woman also died, and their cases are being investigated. Hantavirus typically spreads from rodents – but in the latest outbreak the transmission between people was documented for the first time, the WHO said.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvpzgn26edo


  • AI Will Change the Labor Landscape

    Source: Foundation for Economic Education
    by Jake Scott

    “A particular legal case from China has also caught the interest and attention of many commentators in the West for its potential future significance. In a major landmark decision, the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court upheld a ruling, reached after three years, that a company had unlawfully transferred the risks and costs of technological change onto an employee, in violation of China’s Labor Contract Law. In other words, the Court ruled that the company illegally fired one of their employees for automating his role through AI.” (05/07/26)

    https://fee.org/articles/ai-will-change-the-labor-landscape/

  • One Cheer for Trump’s Germany Troop Withdrawal

    Source: The American Conservative
    by Doug Bandow

    “Like a mad king of old, President Donald Trump spends hours wandering his palace, developing plans to better display his wealth and glory to an increasingly skeptical and antagonistic world. Occasionally he remembers his royal responsibilities and implements the right policy, though even then often for the wrong reason. Such as reducing the number of U.S. troops in Germany. At least it’s a start, though resulting from a fit of pique, since Berlin, like virtually every other government on earth, criticized his lawless, reckless attack on Iran, which is disrupting the global economy. He is threatening to do the same to Italy and Spain, whose political leaders also have denounced Trump’s bungled aggression, openly conducted on behalf of the Israeli government rather than the American people.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/one-cheer-for-trumps-germany-troop-withdrawal/

  • The Populism of Bicentennial Commercialism

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Joel Schlosberg

    “In the months leading up to the USA’s 250th birthday party, some debris from its 200th is making headlines. The New York Times‘s Jennifer Schuessler finds conspicuously ‘much less investment and enthusiasm overall’ for this year’s semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than the 1976 bicentennial, itself diminished by jaded jeers charging that ‘‘Buy-centennial’ huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76’ (‘How a Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76,’ May 5). Schuessler chronicles plenty of ‘hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles’ currently being hawked under the aegis of Donald Trump, but compared to such bicentennial-branded excrescences of ‘unapologetic 1976-style schlock’ as toilet paper, diapers and condoms, even the output of a coauthor of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life can be described on the pages of the Gray Lady as ‘tasteful.'” (05/07/26)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20570

  • America’s Immigration Prohibitionism Breeds Cartel Violence, Not Undocumented Immigrants

    Source: The UnPopulist
    by Nathan Goodman and Molly Rovinski

    “When legal pathways to immigration are closed, migrants don’t stop coming — they turn to smugglers. Smugglers must pay cartels to move people through their territory. The more aggressively the United States restricts legal entry and patrols traditional crossing routes, the more dangerous those crossings become, and the more indispensable smugglers — and the cartels behind them — become. The result is a perverse inversion of the stated goal: the harder Trump and Miller push to seal the border, the more they enrich the organizations they claim to be fighting.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/americas-immigration-prohibitionism

  • Defenders of the Jones Act Have Lost

    Source: Cato Institute
    by Scott Lincicome

    “For more than a century, the Jones Act has survived on purported economic and security grounds. Its waiver by the Trump administration for Operation Epic Fury reveals serious flaws in both rationales. Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, as it’s formally known, requires that goods shipped between US ports travel on vessels that are US-built, US-flagged, US-owned, and crewed predominantly by US citizens. Because of this legally-enforced domestic shipping monopoly, building and operating ships in America today costs far more than doing so abroad, and domestic coastwise shipping is effectively non-existent outside the few places that have no choice, such as Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Rather than bolstering US commercial shipping capacity and the merchant marine, the Jones Act has presided over the steady degradation of both.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.cato.org/commentary/defenders-jones-act-have-lost

  • Trump’s blockade is an act of war, not the end of war

    Source: Los Angeles Times
    by Jon Duffy

    “President Trump recently described the U.S. naval blockade of Iran as ‘a very friendly blockade.’ There is no such thing. A blockade is an act of war, using armed forces to restrict another nation’s movement, commerce and access to the sea. It does not become peaceful because no one challenges it on a particular day. Trump’s administration says the ceasefire with Iran means he no longer has to seek congressional authorization to continue the war beyond 60 days, even though federal law requires it. A ceasefire may pause the shooting. It does not make an ongoing act of war disappear. The president can argue that the blockade is necessary. He cannot honestly argue that the war is effectively over while keeping the blockade in place. More dangerous than Trump’s word choice is Congress’[s] silence.” (05/07/26)

    https://archive.is/KvzlJ

  • A Few More Thoughts On AI And Consciousness

    Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
    by Caitlin Johnstone

    “Richard Dawkins is currently the subject of much laughter and ridicule over his recent article for UnHerd admitting that a highly sycophantic chatbot had convinced him that it might be conscious. I’m seeing the question ‘How can you be confident that AIs aren’t conscious?’ pop up a lot in response to the controversy. Speaking for myself, I would say I am confident the chatbots aren’t conscious in the same way I’m confident the animatronics at Disneyland aren’t conscious. I know humans constructed them to mimic the behavior of a sentient person. We know this for a fact. Nobody’s pretending otherwise. I am infinitely more likely to believe an animal is conscious than that an LLM is, because nobody programmed them to respond to things like pain and social stimulus in ways that are similar to humans.” (05/07/26)

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/05/07/a-few-more-thoughts-on-ai-and-consciousness/

  • Is Economics Finally Becoming Trustworthy?

    Source: EconLog
    by James B Bailey

    “A core premise of science is that research should be replicable. If one scientist creates an experiment to measure a physical constant like the speed of light, and they document their experiment well enough, other scientists should be able to perform the same experiment and find the same result. If one lab’s results can’t be replicated anywhere else, then like cold fusion, they probably aren’t real. Outside of hard sciences like physics we don’t expect to get the same precision. Perhaps one trial finds a drug reduces heart attacks by 17%, while another finds 14%. But for research to usefully inform our actions, it needs to be at least somewhat replicable.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.econlib.org/econlog/economics-finally-trustworthy

  • The Surcharge Tax Americans Pay to Finance Israel’s Wars

    Source: CounterPunch
    by Jamal Kanj

    “Since early March 2026, the average American household has been spending 50 percent more to fill their tank than just one month earlier. The Trump administration and its Israel-first ideologues blamed market forces for the spike, framing it as short-term pain for long-term gain. What they will not say, what they are never permitted to say in Washington, is that Americans have been living the ‘pain’ of the Israeli oil surcharge tax for more than half a century. The bill keeps growing, but no longer only financially. The U.S. is also paying with something harder to rebuild than a budget, its moral standing in the world.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/07/the-surcharge-tax-americans-pay-to-finance-israels-wars/

  • Israel’s “permanent security” quest is a policy with sinister implications

    Source: Responsible Statecraft
    by Martin Di Caro

    “The goal of eliminating any potential or future threats, real or imaginary, will all but inevitably dehumanize and create new enemies.” (05/07/26)

    https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-permanent-war/

  • Why the US Tax Code Isn’t Truly Progressive [sic]

    Source: Inequality.org
    by Reyanna James

    “A recent analysis from the Tax Foundation argues that the US federal income tax system remains solidly progressive. Citing new Internal Revenue Service data for tax year 2023, the group is emphasizing that high-income taxpayers pay the highest average tax rates and account for a large share of total income taxes paid. On its face, that claim sounds reassuring—a sign that our tax code must surely be doing its job. But this framing leaves out a critical part of the story. Yes, the wealthy pay more in taxes than everyone else. The real question: whether they’re paying enough, their fair share relative to their rapidly growing share of our nation’s income and wealth. By that measure, the answer must be a clear no. The US tax system, the underlying data show, remains far less progressive than it once was — and far less effective at counteracting inequality than it needs to be.” (05/07/26)

    https://inequality.org/article/who-pays-federal-income-taxes/

  • The New Property-Tax Revolts

    Source: Common Sense
    by Paul Jacob

    “Decades after a famous revolt by California homeowners led to the relief provided by Proposition 13, taxpayers acting to resist sky-high property taxes are making waves throughout the country.” (05/07/6)

    https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/05/07/the-new-property-tax-revolts/

  • GOP Wants to Put Workers Under AI’s Thumb: Shorter Work Week Is Better Answer

    Source: Beat the Press
    by Dean Baker

    “Productivity growth is an old concept; we’ve been seeing it at a substantial pace for more than 200 years. Nonetheless, many elite intellectual types like to claim they know nothing about it when they talk about AI. It’s far from clear how much of a productivity boom we will see with AI. For people who are lost with my reference to productivity growth, the story that AI will take all the jobs is a story of a massive productivity boom. If that happens, it will mean that the people who are still working will be hugely more productive, since we will be producing the same or more goods and services as we do at present, with many fewer people working. FWIW, virtually no major forecaster or forecasting agency is projecting anything like this productivity boom. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that productivity growth will average 1.5 percent over the next decade.” (05/07/26)

    https://cepr.net/publications/april-2026-jobs-preview/

  • The Nominal Anchor Still Holds

    Source: Macroeconomic Policy News
    by David Beckworth

    “The Inflation Trauma Lingers, but the Fed’s Credibility Endures for Now.” (05/07/26)

    https://macroeconomicpolicynexus.substack.com/p/the-nominal-anchor-still-holds

  • Where California Went Wrong

    Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
    by William L Anderson

    “When I was a child, California was really the Promised Land, something cemented in my mind when we came here on vacation in 1961. We saw mountains, Lake Tahoe, the bridges of San Francisco, the spectacular California Pacific coast, and, of course, we went to Disneyland. As a young adult, I ran track for the University of Tennessee and one of the annual highlights of the season was our dual meet with UCLA at Drake Stadium on the university’s campus. (I ran very well against UCLA’s runners, thank you). There really was no place that compared with California, a vast land of so many spectacular things. Unfortunately, there is still a vastness of things here, but many of them are spectacularly negative.” (05/07/26)

    https://mises.org/mises-wire/where-california-went-wrong

  • Canada Is Quietly Putting War Into Your Portfolio

    Source: Common Dreams
    by Umer Azad

    “Canada is set to host the headquarters of the proposed Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank, or DSRB, a new multinational institution designed to mobilize tens of billions in financing for military and security projects among allied nations. In short, what we are seeing is the quiet normalization of something far more consequential: the permanent financialization of war. The structure being envisioned for DSRB closely resembles other multilateral financial institutions. It would raise capital on global markets, issue bonds, and extend loans to governments and defense companies. That means funding for military supply chains, weapons systems, and defense infrastructure would increasingly flow through financial markets rather than direct public expenditure. In doing so, war itself risks being transformed from a political decision subject to public scrutiny into a financial product embedded in portfolios.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/canada-war-portfolio

  • Trump’s Corruption Is Going to Sink Him

    Source: The Bulwark
    by Mona Charen

    “Conditions are right for voters to stop turning a blind eye to his greed, grift, and gold leaf.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-corruption-irs-lawsuit-plane-crypto-scam-pardons

  • Counter-Intuitive Econ

    Source: Bet On It
    by Alexander Craig

    “I want to defend the idea that economics has some counter-intuitive propositions to offer. It does depend on what ‘intuitive’ means, though. I think it’s fair to say that something is intuitive if someone without formal training in the area can think it through on their own. If it takes an economist re-framing the issue to show the answer makes sense, it’s not necessarily intuitive. In other words, economics can be made intuitive, but it takes effort and skill.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.betonit.ai/p/counter-intuitive-econ

  • Trump Leaves Ukraine’s Future to Europe

    Source: Washington Monthly
    by Tamar Jacoby

    “Can a fractious continent unite to win the war against Russia and secure democracy in Ukraine?” (05/07/26)

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/05/07/trump-leaves-ukraines-future-to-europe/

  • The false choice between creating abundance and constraining autocracy

    Source: Niskanen Center
    by Alexander Mechanick

    “Policy discourse in the United States today has a split personality. Many condemn how procedural rules thwart not only efforts to build — housing, energy, and more — but more generally keep presidents from achieving their policy ambitions and worsen our ‘vetocracy.’ Yet others lament how presidents are left too free to pursue their policy aims lawlessly or abusively. These concerns are often raised by the same commentators. Even though these discourses are largely about the same topic—the administrative procedures that constrain government action and govern judicial challenges to it — the two have proceeded almost entirely in parallel. The result is a bizarre discourse superposition, where the executive branch is simultaneously excessively and insufficiently constrained.” (05/07/26)

    https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-false-choice-between-creating-abundance-and-constraining-autocracy/